Extreme weather: This is fine…
My power’s been out since Friday night because of the huge wave of storms that ripped through several states. But my family was extremely lucky. 64 people are confirmed dead in Kentucky alone, with more missing and likely dead. A horrible tragedy nearly positively caused or severely worsened by climate change.
To mainstream media’s credit, some of the bigger outlets (including NBC) are explicitly mentioning climate change as a factor in the severity of last weekend’s storms. From a report from NBC News:
According to an interview with a climate expert on Democracy Now, one of the tornadoes may have been the worst ever recorded
(Click to watch the clip on democracynow.org)
“[A thunderstorm supercell is] a very wide area of organized convection, we call it. There’s a lot of turbulence in the atmosphere that produces these thunderstorms. And they sort of form a very long line of thunderstorms that are located along the frontal boundaries, the boundaries between the cold air and the warm air that are associated with the jet stream. [...]
“And once you get the rotation, once you’re able to combine that with some rotation in the atmosphere, again, you’re going to see the sorts of tornado outbreaks that we saw here: across six states, more than 30 tornadoes, and one tornado that [...] by some measures, was unprecedented.
“There were winds measured of more than 300 miles per hour. There was debris that was found 30,000 feet up in the atmosphere. And it traveled nearly 200 miles — again, something we’ve never seen before. The stronger that storm, the more energy in that storm, the more likely it is to survive. And this one survived for nearly 200 miles, doing ever more damage because of that.” MICHAEL MANN, professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University via Democracy Now!
Although this is a horribly deadly case of severe weather caused or made worse by climate change, the general narrative in the media doesn’t discuss the severity of what’s going on with our climate.
Before the mass tornado event, extreme weather had just made the news due to extreme temperatures, both hot and cold, in various parts in the US. One that got a good amount of traction on social media was the fact that it snowed in Hawaii! But the good ole New York Times, among other mainstream outlets, tried to reassure us that there was nothing to worry about it.
Oh — it’s just snow on top of a mountain. What’s the big deal?
After citing a random, unnamed person on Twitter who said ““Guys. Guys. Calm down […] We get snow on the top of Mauna Kea almost every winter,” buried near the end of the article are a couple of hints that maybe the recent weather in Hawaii, including this snow system, is unusual and dangerous.
And it’s not just the snow — in other areas there’s a chance of deadly conditions, including landslides.
They eventually say that this is the coldest it’s been in Hawaii in almost 60 years — but then add a lighthearted note to almost make it seem like a good thing.
See, everything’s fine, right? Just grab a blanket and don’t worry about extreme temperatures and extreme storms in all corners of the US and the world.
Looking at several stories in the NY Times about the aftermath of the deadly storms in Kentucky, I don’t see climate mentioned at all.
Note: That doesn’t mean no story the NY Times has published about the storms mentions it; I just looked at several articles 1, 2, 3, 4 and searched for the word “climate” in them to no avail.
No, this is not fine. We need to demand better from media. Similar to Biden’s much-publicized pledge for the US to go carbon neutral…but only gradually (from now until 2050), some of the media gradually doing better at covering the climate emergency is not enough. If we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, people need to be informed so they can understand the stakes of the rapidly deteriorating state of our planet’s climate.
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